Conventionally, feed for livestock such as hay, silage or other stock feed material is generally prepared and stored in the form of round or square/rectangular bales. Such bales are typically stored in fields for later feeding to the livestock to supplement their dietary intake.
Traditional methods of feeding such bales involve dispensing the bales on an individual basis. In this regard, the bales are typically manually loaded onto trucks and manually pushed off the truck at intervals to provide a number of feeding sites for the livestock to access and feed on the bales. Any breakage of the bales into smaller pieces is also typically done manually prior to unloading the bales from the truck. As the bales are often quite large and heavy, and tightly bound together with string, this can be very tiresome and labour intensive task, requiring a number of workers. Due to the manual nature of the task, there is much potential for causing physical damage to a person handling the bales.
A number of mechanically operated feeders have been proposed to assist in transporting and unloading bales from the feeder onto the ground for the livestock to feed on. Many of these devices involve various complicated mechanical structures that feed the bales by way of sliding or tilting movements of a variety of moving parts. The disadvantage with such feeders is that they are typically designed at unloading individual bales, and do not provide a device that is adapted to feed multiple bales to large numbers of livestock without having to make numerous trips to a supply to reload the device. In addition, where bales are bound together with string, there is no way for safely and automatically handling the string other than manually removing the string. The presence of loose pieces of string can result in the string becoming entangled in the machinery of the feeder as the bales are being unloaded. This can cause temporary or permanent failure of the feeding equipment/machinery resulting in an increase in cost and time to the farmer/primary producer.
Accordingly, there is a need to provide a hay and silage feeder that is able to feed large numbers of stock in a safe and reliable manner.
Any discussion of documents, acts, materials, devices, articles or the like which has been included in the present specification is solely for the purpose of providing a context for the present invention. It is not to be taken as an admission that any or all of these matters form part of the prior art base or were common general knowledge in the field relevant to the present invention as it existed before the priority date of each claim of this application.